out of inodes

out of inodes

This article shows you how I dealt with an "out of inodes" problem.

How’d it happen?

I was installing the entire ports tree on a new box. 
It froze.  So I restarted it.  Then it froze again.  OK, this time I
noticed the following messages on the console:

Jul  5 14:25:48 little /kernel: pid 431 (cpio), uid 0 on /usr2: 
                                                     out of inodes
Jul  5 14:26:19 little last message repeated 2550 times
Jul  5 14:28:20 little last message repeated 10276 times
Jul  5 14:28:25 little last message repeated 451 times

inode background

The problem is that we didn’t have enough inodes.  This is a common problem when
you have many files of a small size.  If you look at the man
page for newfs
, you’ll see the following:

-f frag-size
The fragment size of the file system in bytes. It must be a pow

2 thoughts on “out of inodes”

  1. Jonatan Wallmander

    I didn’t know what inodes were when encountering this problem due to qmail saving up loads of undelivered messages. Now I do know.

    Thanks!

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